ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2002
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2002

Intonational variation in the british isles

Esther Grabe, Brechtje Post

Models of intonation are typically based on one dialect and one style and do not account for inter- or intra-speaker variability. Speech data from the IViE corpus, however, demonstrate considerable variation in English intonation that occurs both across and within dialects (IViE = Intonational Variation in English, UK ESRC award R000237145, http://www.phon.ox.ac.k/~esther/ivyweb). In this paper, we introduce the IViE corpus and present a selection of findings. Concentrating on nuclear accents, we provide evidence for (1) variation in the production of nuclear accent types and (2) variation in the phonetic realisation of nuclear accents. We discuss data from seven dialects. The results show that intonational differences between dialects of one language can be greater than intonational differences between dialects of two different languages. They also show that there is considerable intra-dialectal variation.